Spent fuel rods are a critical problem for U.S.

[caption id="attachment_12729" align="alignright" width="300" caption="In this photo released by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism via Kyodo News, Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, is pictured around 4:57 p.m. on March 11, 2011 shortly after the facilities were hit by the tsunami. (AP Photo) "][/caption]

CYPRESS, Art Anderson: Part of Japan's problem is that it has not yet completed its nuclear waste reprocessing facility. Spent fuel rods were stored on site, which has been a big problem at Fukushima.

The Europeans, who have been committed to nuclear power, have built reprocessing plants and are responsible in dealing with their waste. They have built underground storage facilities for the residuals left over from the reprocessing. [Photos of Japanese earthquake, tsunami]

The United States has the technology to reprocess nuclear wastes, but when Jimmy Carter was president a law against building these facilities was passed because some plutonium was a reusable product and fear was generated that terrorists could, in a remote possibility, steal some plutonium.

Further fear used by the environmental Left enabled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to shut down construction of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Facility in Nevada. As a consequence the United States, like Japan, is storing its spent fuel rods at its nuclear power plants. This gives us a very similar problem to Japan.

Our reactors are well designed but the spent fuel rod pools may be vulnerable in a disaster. Particularly in California, where earthquakes are a real threat, we should stop storing these rods at the plants.

The obvious answer is to overturn the anti-nuclear waste reprocessing rules and build at least one reprocessing facility, allowing us to get these fuel rods out of the nuclear power plants.

We need to rethink the Yucca Mountain facility. While Yucca Mountain was shut down through fear there should be much greater fear of storing the fuel rods at the nuclear power plants a far less safe alternative.

The environmental movement would suggest that we should just shut down the nuclear power industry in the United States. This is an impractical solution and driven by a false ideology.

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